Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

I fell asleep, missing the nightgown the laundry had shredded, missing Walter, and then I dreamed that I stood on the cliff at the gravel pit, overlooking the flat spot where Zillah and I had played. I dreamed that I jumped, not from the lower ledge where I’d broken my arm, but from the cliff itself, a hundred feet above the ground. I jumped and Zillah jumped beside me, and this time our arms did what we’d always wanted: we held them out and they turned into wings. Our arm bones shortened; our fingers lengthened enormously and splayed like spiders’ legs; smooth skin spanned our bones in flexible folds. We grew the wings of bats, the leathery membrane stretching back to our legs, and we sailed over the gravel pit in silent flight.

There was an epidemic in Westfield the year Zillah and I got sick: she caught it from one of the children her grandmother cared for each afternoon and I caught it from her. On the last day I saw her, she’d drooped over the village we were building from Popsicle sticks and said her throat was sore. I meant to visit her the next day, when she didn’t come to school, but by then my own throat was aching and burning and I had a headache so bad that the sunlight pained me. And so we were sick in our separate homes, which wasn’t entirely my fault: I was nine and the world was run by adults, and I had no power to force my mother to take Zillah in or to park myself at Zillah’s and refuse to leave.

I had lain in my own bed, in my own room, and my mother took care of me as I’d known she would although we didn’t get along. I was bundled off to the doctor, given medicine, packed in ice; I was sponged and changed and bathed and fed, held and sung to and comforted. My father sat by me at night, when he came home from work. Mumu sat there in her wheelchair and stroked my hands. Our house was worn and we were pinched for money and my parents fought, but while the skin peeled off my hands and feet and the soft covering of my tongue dissolved, my parents suspended their differences and they took care of me. Meanwhile my fever soared so high that I heard Zillah’s voice, which is how I know the way her illness went.

I hadn’t understood until then that Zillah’s life differed from mine. She was miserable at home and so was I, and I had thought our situations were equivalent. A false empathy: I imagined that my life was actually as bad as Zillah’s. As if there were no difference between having no food I liked and having no food; between having a grandmother in a wheelchair who lived with us because my father wished it and having a grandmother who lived there because she had no place else to go. I had been in the place where Zillah lived, but I hadn’t understood it, any more than I’d understood how relatively safe I was. Zillah lived in the corner of a long, low, concrete project, where the apartments were stacked like building blocks. The stairs ran up the outside and led to outdoor walkways, onto which the apartment doors opened. The door to Zillah’s place was red, and inside were uncurtained windows and cardboard boxes spilling clothes, scuffed linoleum and a green shag rug and a dark line across the wall where the children Zillah’s grandmother cared for — four of them, plus Zillah’s sister and two brothers — ran their fingers. Zillah had no father; her mother worked at the corrugated box plant and was never home. Her sister had a cleft lip that had never been repaired. All those children got sick, passing streptococci among themselves like toys, and there was no space in there for Zillah to rest, no person able to devote himself completely to her.

There in my hotel room in China I dreamed I’d done what I’d wished: that I’d rescued Zillah and healed her so we could fly away. But actually I’d done no such thing. The morning my own illness left I lost Zillah, and with her any brief understanding I’d had of her world. I was left with the knowledge that I’d been lucky and she had not, but I was nine and couldn’t make the next connection: I lost the glimpse I’d had of the idea that good luck was an accident of birth. Two of us had gotten sick and one of us had died, and I thought what had spared me had only been blind chance. That the doctor, the proper medicine, the food and care and shelter I was given had nothing to do with my recovery; that whatever had stricken Zillah might strike me. In the absence of Zillah’s voice our lives seemed equivalent once more, which I took to mean that her luck would be mine if I didn’t take drastic steps. And so I laid on the padding that would insulate me from the world, and later on I ran away from everyone and every situation that made me think my life was like Zillah’s. I ran toward safety. I stockpiled stuff, as if I’d stay lucky if I owned enough. And yet in my dream, Zillah and I flew naked and unburdened. While she lived, what we had sought was always light.

I woke when Walter came to bed, and when he slipped beneath the sheets I crept from my bed to his and then clung to him as I hadn’t done in months. ‘I want,’ I meant to say. ‘I know,’ he was meant to answer. Almost a year since we’d made love. I pressed my skin to his as though I could dissolve the membrane between us. I ran my hands along his thighs and felt them firm and lean and strong; I licked his neck and tasted familiar salt. ‘Make love to me,’ I murmured, but he was still and cold against me. He wrapped his arms about me obediently, he threw his leg over mine, but there was no pressure, no warmth, he never grew hard. When I took him in my mouth he felt cool, smooth, small, dead, his penis just a piece of flesh like any other, soft as the skin on the inside of my arm. He pulled away from me. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m tired.’ He rolled over and fell asleep, his ribcage expanding with each breath and then falling silently, the air moving gently in and out of his mouth. I watched him sleep and I thought about Zillah, who had known that my life was blessed with all I’d ever need, and whose voice had returned with the news that I’d thrown it all away, that I’d squandered near everything.

I rose from the bed an hour later and dressed quietly. This time I didn’t make the mistake of leaving through the lobby; I crept down the stairs and along the back hall to the door that led out to the gardens. The air was cool and fragrant and a fountain splashed. I walked along the gravel paths, past flowering bushes and trees someone had pruned into artful shapes, and I watched the clouds move over the surface of the moon. If I’d been at home, or in any other place, I would have found a phone and called Rocky. I would have taken a bus or a cab to his place, borrowed a car, sent a telegram, but none of that was possible here and there was no way for me to reach him. I sat down heavily on a rough stone bench and wept for Zillah and Rocky and Walter; for my own frustration; for my inability to understand the smallest part of the world. My mother-in-law kept a shoebox in her closet, in which were all the letters her husband had sent her from France, during the war. Mumu kept a clumsy doll her husband had carved from a lobster buoy. Even my mother, unsentimental and sour, had dried roses from her wedding bouquet in a small glass box. Walter and I had a house full of his things and a storage room full of mine; a textbook full of his words and a few of my drawings; a handful of papers from our early days together. That was all.

When I looked up, I saw a man across the pond at my feet. His size and shape were enough like Rocky’s that I almost called out before I caught myself. He gave no sign that he’d seen me, although the moon was nearing full and lit the garden palely. He bent over the water and set down two long pieces of bark on which he’d placed some petals and twigs. As I watched, he took two scraps of paper from his shirt pocket and laid one on each piece of bark, and then he said a few soft words and struck a match and set the rafts on fire. He crouched down lower and blew the flaming rafts away from the shore and toward the center of the pool. The rafts flared, burned brightly for a minute, and then disappeared. When they did, the man stood up and brushed his hands on his pants and looked directly at me. He didn’t look like Rocky at all.